Braininess is not attractive unless combined with some signs of elegance; class.

He never wanted to be away from her. She had the spark of life.

I was amazed as people must be who are seized and kidnapped, and who realize that in the strange world of their captors they have a value absolutely unconnected with anything they know about themselves.

His face contained for me all possibilities of fierceness and sweetness, pride and submissiveness, violence, self-containment. I never saw more in it than I had when I saw it first, because I saw everything then. The whole thing in him that I was going to love, and never catch or explain.

You think that would have changed things? The answer is of course, and for a while, and never.

We say of some things that they can't be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do-we do it all the time.

I sit watching the brown oceanic waves of dry country rising into the foothills and I weep monotonously, seasickly. Life is not like the dim ironic stories I like to read, it is like a daytime serial on television. The banality will make you weep as much as anything else.